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In contemporary urban areas, a growing ‘generation rent’ is finding shelter in expensive and precarious private rental housing. Tenant organisations and legislative initiatives have been pushing to improve housing conditions for renters, yet have been met with strong resistance. Intense policy and academic debates have ensued. This paper delves into the discourses used by dominant actors involved in legislative changes affecting the private rental sector in Catalonia and Spain. Through a critical discourse analysis of the positions of governments, opposition parties and landlord organisations, we identify three main arguments employed to limit or contest ‘post-neoliberal’ measures favouring tenants: ‘the vulnerable landlord’, ‘the counterproductive effects’ and ‘the violation of property rights’. Each of these arguments is placed under theoretical and empirical scrutiny, revealing important weaknesses. By unsettling dominant discourses, we contribute to advancing the terms of the debates and sketch out the coordinates for a counter-discourse informed by critical theory and the interests of renters rather than rentiers.

This paper analyses how tenants' organizations approach the state for "post-neoliberal housing policy" that challenges decades of neoliberal housing governance. It introduces the concept of "counter-hegemonic legislative strategies" to illustrate how tenants' movements in Spain have achieved this policy shift by influencing legislative changes. In contrast to traditional lobbying or representation-focused movements, unions aim to organize tenants offensively against the commodification of housing and capitalist relations, positioning themselves as counter-hegemonic forces. The paper outlines three mechanisms used to achieve this: turning tenant evictions and landlord threats into acts of civil disobedience; using the media strategically to shape narratives; and exploiting institutional windows of opportunity through alliances and political crises. While the legislative victories gained by these unions may fall short of their full demands, the paper emphasizes that their impact goes beyond political outcomes. Their activities contribute to contesting neoliberal housing trajectories, disrupting hegemonic governance, and reshaping the political landscape.

Spain was one of the most severely hit countries by the 2008 global financial crisis. More than ten years after, the belated economic recovery has hardly changed the roots of that crisis, especially the financialization of the real estate sector. Remarkably, from 2009 to the present, several grassroots struggles have questioned those roots and demanded solutions to the affordability housing crisis. In this study, we examine two salient cases: the campaign against the Bankia bank and opposition to the international investment fund Blackstone. Both firms forced thousands of home evictions upon financially broken homeowners and tenants, respectively, the latter doing so via sharp rent increases. Here we investigate the claims, protest repertoires and achievements of these housing struggles. Our analysis shows that every type of grassroots’ response was shaped by a distinct process of capital accumulation through the financialization of housing. The first was driven mainly by austerity policies and the second by state-led actions to reignite housing speculation.

Since the 2008 economic recession, state intervention in the real estate sector has strengthened. This article explains how housing financialization was reignited in Spain following key policy reforms in 2013. We argue that Spanish authorities managed to strategically recreate a finance-friendly environment to attract global investors. They combined financial policies, other deregulatory reforms and neoliberal measures in a coordinated manner we call a policy package. Our analysis provides evidence of the legal and political arrangements at various state levels that effectively facilitated the reanimation of a new cycle of housing financialization which caused rising inflation in prices and distress in tenants’ rights. This approach contributes to the understanding of how state-led actions foster a spatial fix to overcome financial crises by granting global speculative funds extraordinary benefits. In addition, we show how this process occurred with poor democratic accountability and was also confronted by various forms of social contestation.

Impoverished and working-class migrant women have been the hardest hit and most exploited people during both the real estate-financial accumulation cycle and the aftermath of the 2008 crisis in Spain. Since 2009, these women have also been the key actors in outstanding civil disobedience to the neoliberal financial rule through their engagement in housing activism. How has this happened, and with what effects? Our research responds to these questions by focusing on the collective and contextualized strategies of extended struggles for social reproduction. This analytical framework integrates intersectional social structures, spatio-temporal dimensions of social reproduction, and the historical context of real-estate financialisation. Additionally, we argue that the notion of a “double horizon of political temporality” helps explain how the housing struggle evolved and identifies which social and political outcomes were produced. We suggest that this case reveals the mechanisms and impacts of similar grassroots movements challenging the current financialised dynamics of capitalism.

Desde sus inicios en 2009, la Plataforma de Afectadas por la Hipoteca (PAH) constituyó una extraordinaria respuesta social a algunas de las consecuencias más dramáticas de la crisis financiera global de 2008: desempleo, ejecuciones hipotecarias, financiarización de la vivienda y desahucios. Este movimiento social fue ampliamente cubierto por los medios de comunicación social. En este artículo analizamos cuatro documentales en los que se representa la PAH con el objetivo de comparar, en primer lugar, el contenido de los documentales entre sí y, en segundo lugar, su relación con el contexto contencioso en el que surge este movimiento por la vivienda. Para ello, hemos interpretado socio-semióticamente las estrategias narrativas de las películas además de entrevistar a sus cineastas y a algunos activistas de la PAH de Madrid, aunque uno de los documentales también representa principalmente a la PAH de Barcelona. Mediante la comparación de los documentales examinados encontramos que las dos principales estrategias narrativas se dividen entre ‘cine directo’ y ‘cine divulgativo’, por una parte, y énfasis en las esferas ‘macro’ o ‘micro’ sociales del contexto de representación, por la otra. Por último, concluimos que la implicación activista de los directores fue decisiva en la producción y diseminación de las películas analizadas.

The Spanish real estate and its 'sea and sun' tourism model, were profoundly disrupted during the Great Recession of 2008-2014 As a result, hedge funds and their speculative operations have favoured an intense process of urban touristification in the largest Spanish cities, especially over the past ten years. The aim of this paper is to examine how the COVID-19 crisis has triggered shifts in the supply of short-term rentals and the type of demand of such rentals. By taking into account such changes, we will address the potential changes that the current pandemic scenario might bring between the 'classical' real estate market and short-term rentals in Spain.

'Claudia' is neither a real name nor an owner who puts a room at the service of the collaborative economy. It is a pseudonym used by a transnational company which manages short-rentals apartments: 211 Airbnb listings in Madrid, 138 of which are in the city centre. This paper's main arguments are based on the fact that Madrid city centre is experiencing a process of airbnbisation which is driven by professional actors specialized in the short-term rental business. The analysis of this model includes an in-depth examination of the professionalization, concentration and monopolization of Airbnb in Madrid, from a temporal and territorial perspective. The paper concludes that Airbnb in Madrid is dominated by professional actors specialized in the business of renting apartments as short-term rentals, who mainly operate within the city's Central District, and whose activity does not comply with the principles of the sharing economy. This model has more to do with traditional forms of accommodation than with new hospitality models based on the sharing economy principles, and generates negative impacts on the economic sustainability of the city and its inhabitants.

Since its inception in 2009, the housing movement in Spain, led by the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH), has confronted a devastating wave of housing foreclosures and evictions. Remarkably, the PAH has enjoyed wide coverage in the mass media. Among the latter, numerous fiction and non-fiction films have portrayed home evictions and the housing struggles opposing them. This article selects four documentaries focused on the PAH and investigates how they represent the context of social and political contention and their contribution to fostering housing activism. In so doing, we mainly use first-hand interviews with the filmmakers and a comparative analysis of the narrative strategies followed by each documentary. As for the context, we present the demands, campaigns and protest repertoires of the PAH in relation to the post-2008 global financial crisis, which frames the political significance of the documentaries. By comparing the examined documentaries, we find that their narrative strategies split into ‘direct’ and ‘lecturing’ approaches on the one hand, and ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ spheres of the context subject to representation on the other. In addition, the filmmaker’s activist engagement substantially shaped the production and dissemination of the films.